Pulitzers for Professors and for Penn State Coverage

The 2012 Pulitzer Prizes were announced Monday, and a number of the winners have higher education connections.

The Harrisburg Patriot-News won the local reporting prize for "courageously revealing and adeptly covering the explosive Penn State sex scandal involving former football coach Jerry Sandusky." And John Sullivan, a senior lecturer in journalism at Northwestern University, co-led the team at The Philadelphia Inquirer that won the public service award for "exploration of pervasive violence in the city’s schools."

Academics tend to be well-represented among the winners in the Pulitzer's cultural categories, and this year was no exception:

• The late Manning Marable, who was the M. Moran Weston and Black Alumni Council Professor of African American Studies and a professor of history and public affairs at Columbia University when he died last year, won the prize for history for Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (Viking).
• John Lewis Gaddis, the Robert A. Lovett Professor of History at Yale University, won the prize for biography for George F. Kennan: An American Life (The Penguin Press).
• Tracy K. Smith, of the creative writing faculty at Princeton University, won the prize for poetry for Life on Mars (Graywolf Press).
• Stephen Greenblatt, the Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, won the prize for general nonfiction for The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (W.W. Norton and Company).
• Kevin Puts, who is on the composition faculty of the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, won the prize for music for "Silent Night: Opera in Two Acts."